Permutations
by Angel Gidget
Summary: There are five Batmans in the room and one Robin. It sounds like the start of a horrible joke, but Tim isn't finding anything funny about it.


In honor of **days 6-8 of Tim Drake Week** ( _AU, free for all, and birthday_ ) we have a Convergence-style crossover! If convergence were more of a messy free-for-all involving time travel and not, y'know, an ostensibly fair battle of multiverse pairs. I may have taken liberties. Enjoy them.

* * *

There are five Batmans in the room and one Robin. It sounds like the start of a horrible joke, but Tim isn't finding anything funny about it. Apparently, they were all consumed by a cosmic light that dragged them to this extra dilapidated version of Gotham that's stuck under a dome. Tim was the only Robin physically holding onto his Batman at the time, since Bruce was helping him into the jet to make things easier on his cracked rib.

The Batman with the least armored costume—it's a Dick Grayson under that cowl, Tim would swear it—is controlling his panic over where _his_ Robin might be. Said something about how the kid was refusing to leave his sword behind and had gone after the perp even after he had been ordered to regroup. Robin with a sword. Tim gets the distinct feeling that _that_ Batman's Robin is a bird of an entirely different feather.

The other three make no mention of Robin.

Which is just as well, since two of the three _cannot_ be trusted, and the third is a wildcard.

Jean-Paul Valley's tendency to beef up his armor with red accents and nods to his Templar obsessions makes him immediately identifiable, even if he's (probably) from a completely different universe. Tim hopes so, but the next Batman is the one who has him on high alert and makes his heart sink, because he _knows_ that one.

His fists clench as the Batman with the darkest armor narrows his eyes in Tim's direction.

"Hello, Tim."

He feels Bruce tense next to him, prickling at both the stranger and the use of names in the field.

"Go to hell."

His voice is more horse than he would like—he was taken from a fight that involved a little too much smoke inhalation—but it's firm. It's the voice of Robin, refusing to be cowed.

His old enemy just gives the faintest smirk before replying, but a shift of his shoulder moves his cape. There's the faint glint of a Glock at his hip, and he knows that it will put Bruce on high alert. And hopefully, identify him to B as well.

"We both know that you _could_ make that happen, but you won't."

He would honestly rather go up against Killer Crock and Bane at the same time with both hands tied behind his back than deal with this. Deal with _himself._ His crazy future self who grimly justifies every drop of blood on his hands with words that always hit too close to home. At least the psycho doesn't have his equally evil band of grown-up Titans with him. Small favors.

He feels a flicker of relief when Dick—not his Dick perhaps, but close enough by the look of alarm on his face—inches closer to his and Bruce's side of the room in a protective stance.

The final Batman doesn't move an inch.

Tim can't tell for the life of him who is under that cowl. First off, it's not exactly a cowl. It's sure as hell not a mask. It's more of a full-body _everything_ that flows nearly seamlessly from toe to ear-tip. No cape. Enough height in the boots that the space between foot and floor contains _something_ , though he's not sure what.

The bat symbol across the guy's chest is a bright splash of red, and the tech of the suit is something Tim doesn't even have the creativity to dream of. Said tech includes a rather effective voice synthesizer which is… frustrating.

"Incoming." The synthesizer mutters.

The light that transported them is back, but this time with a voice attached. They're supposed to fight each other for the fate of their universes? Seriously? A look between himself, Bruce, and Dick affirms that they don't accept this premise. No one's earth should have to die.

But of course, Jean-Paul immediately launches a volley of razor-sharp batarangs at the lot of them. Overconfident idiot. The fight moves to the empty streets in a hot second.

Tim tries to keep track of where the other two players are, but his shady adult self has already slipped into the shadows to find high ground.

Capeless Batman with his fancy suit is similarly scarce.

Until Robin momentarily looks up and realizes that those mysterious boots were, in fact, hiding jet packs. Jet. Packs. Batman Red-Breast is hovering over them all, observing like a creepy stalker.

 _Takes one to know one,_ whispers an internal voice that sounds too much like his other self.

Speak of the devil. He hears the sweep of a batarang moving towards him from behind, and tries to turn and slide. His rib slows him to the point where he takes a new wound to the arm, just above his elbow.

"Robin!"

Dick is at his side in an instant, offering his own cape as protection, launching a counterattack in the form of smoke pellets that give them cover to move.

Dick is chattering about how his own (Red? What?) Robin back home is too tall to be carried the way Dick is picking him up now as they take a grapple line to one of the lower roofs. Tim has the feeling Dick is no longer talking about the Robin with the sword but about… him? Unclear.

But Dick's cape is still covering him when the bomb goes off.

"Batman!" he screams.

It doesn't matter that every head here would turn at the name. Tim means _his_ Batman. He means Bruce. Bruce who was _down there_ when Jean-Paul decided to escalate things by getting trigger-happy with a _grenade_ in his belt.

Bruce who is now an unmoving bloody shadow against the pavement six stories below.

"No. No no no no…" he breathes.

Dick is still trying to hang onto him like a mother hen, but joint locks work on pretty much anyone, Batmen included. So Tim dodges him, reaching for the bandaging in his belt as he takes the fire escape down to the ground.

He tries not to think about the fact that if he had pulled out said bandages sooner, and maybe used them on himself, perhaps he would have moved faster. Might have still been at B's side when… irrelevant. No.

He tries to ignore the blood, but the smell… the burning retching _smell_ tells him before he even gets his fingers where the pulse should be.

Where the pulse _should_ be. But isn't.

A nauseous wave of déjà vu rolls over him. Tim knelt like this three weeks ago over his father's body. He had been trying to pull the murder weapon out of the corpse. Bruce drew him away and held him.

There's no clear murder weapon to grasp here. Just his finger tips digging into the tattered neck that has blood everywhere except in the veins where it should be. Yet that awful feeling of familiarity hits full force once again as Dick pulls him away and wraps him in cape-covered arms once more.

"Robin… Tim. Oh baby brother, I'm so sorry."

He can barely make out Dick's choked whisper into his hair. There's a ringing in his ears that somehow messes with his sense of time.

Once he's able to make sense of the seconds again, he realizes that way too many have passed. Dick got him away from the street and back into one of the abandoned buildings, taking shelter from the rain that broke out after Dick confirmed that Jean-Paul had taken himself out of the equation as well. Along with… with…

With the whole world.

The light was meant to summon Bruce. With Bruce gone, the champion for their earth is fallen. Their home is forfeit.

He can only be grateful that it doesn't feel real.

Dick looks out over the empty cityscape before straightening his shoulders in a way that asks Tim to be strong. It's time to get down to business.

"I've think I've got your rib taped well enough, and the arm's gonna be okay. But is there anything else? We need to take care of it before we deal with evil Jay again."

Jason?

Tim's brow furrows before the realization hits.

"The Batman with the guns… isn't Jason."

Dick's head cocks to the side, and Tim realizes that maybe Dick didn't get a good look at the darkest Batman. That blacker-than-pitch cape has a way of making a body look so much bigger than it really is.

Not to mention it has a way of making Tim, in the moment, feel very small.

"It's me. Other me. He's… he's what I…"

 _I'm you. And I'm inevitable,_ he used to say.

Dick's hands on his shoulders focus him out of it.

"You're not him. You're not him, and we're gonna stop him. We're gonna find him and Space Boots, and we'll take them out…"

 _And then what?_

"… And then I will find a way to take you home with me."

—

The city isn't quite as empty as they thought.

The sounds of engines and fans draw Robin and Batman—he still has to fight the mental temptation to call Dick Nightwing, but he does fight it—to the scene.

There's an entire department store running on an emergency generator, and cries for help emanating from a window on the building's outer edge. They dive in, glass shattering under their boots.

There's more than one cry in different directions, so they split. Tim heads for the woman who's yelling from the furniture section and Dick runs towards the man in electronics.

Maybe it's his brain still reeling from the shock of several hours ago, or the oddness of suddenly having some noise amidst the silence, but it takes a moment for Tim to realize what was off about the cries.

No interaction. Two people in an empty city calling for help, and they weren't communicating. No listening to each other, no back and forth.

"Damnit."

He tries to turn around when he finally sees the speakers connected to the laptop running the audio-splicing software.

BOOM.

It's a small explosion that triggers a latticework of incendiary chemicals on the ground. The resulting fire is instantaneous and intense, cutting him off from the department entryway. Even with his resistant cape and cowl, Dick won't be able to go directly through.

It's the exact sort of divide-and-conquer trap Tim would have devised himself under the circumstances.

No duh.

He barely gets his bo staff out in time to counter the batarang aiming for his still-aching ribs.

 _Hate you,_ Tim thinks, _Hate you so much._

He follows the 'rangs to the source and comes at the man with head-strikes, one after another.

He doesn't want to let the man talk. Talking just lets him dig his hooks inward, lets him hit twice in the same breath. Robin won't give him that opportunity now.

But he can't breathe like this.

Tim breaks away, and smashes his staff through the west window. Oxygen is pretty crucial for both of them at the moment, and the fire is sucking it up like a sponge.

He hears the cocking of a gun and dives.

The deluxe queen size mattress on sale for seven hundred dollars doesn't hold up very well against the bullets, but thankfully, its headboard does.

He's momentarily surprised by his older self's attempts to kill him before it occurs to him that this… convergence- _thing_ … has probably taken them both outside of the contexts of their time.

Even if his timeline is still connected to this Batman's life, the man will probably choose the possibility of surviving Tim's death over the certain doom of losing the battle.

It takes 2.5 second for the headboard to fail him. Or maybe, his villainous self's aim is just that good that he can group the shots to finally penetrate the metal.

The cover gives way as Tim takes a bullet to his kevlar vest… right over the bad rib.

 _Hate. You._

The pain makes him dizzy. Practically passing out levels of dizzy.

"Playtime's over. Sorry this was necessary," says the grim-cold voice, a few shades deeper than his own.

Tim blinks and realizes that the twisted Batman is changing out his weapons. Of course. Because while Dick and Tim were recovering, he was scavenging and scouting. The laptop. The chemicals. The battleground. And now he's pulling out a small supply of what looks like armor-piercing rounds.

He's going for Dick next.

Tim can't move.

Tim can't move and this _monster_ that is also _him_ is going—

The dented window completely breaks, smashing inward as the last of the Batmen flies through, straight for Tim's grown self.

"You're done." The synthesizer croaks, and Tim can hear pain and anger in those disguised inflections as two patches of black duke it out against a backdrop of pale curtains.

Two shots. Three.

The capeless Batman pulls them both towards what looks like a carefully placed jug on the ground. Jet boots meet remaining chemicals, and at once, the psycho's cape is on fire.

The asshole should stop, drop, and roll immediately, but he chooses to keep fighting instead. His gun makes an empty click, and with no time to reload, he's adjusting stance, preparing to go hand to hand by the window.

The door of the employees-only stairwell by the side of that window smacks open as Dick bursts through, hitting Tim's adult self full-on.

The man slips against the window, but the flames licking from the bottom of his own cape cause his feet to jerk upward, and a moment later, he's falling backwards.

He screams, and Tim can see a hastily-shot grappling hook catch at a broken edge of glass too week to hold it. It takes less than half a second to give.

He hears the crack of bone and more followed by silence.

"Tim!"

Dick's at his side in a heartbeat. He's battling his own instincts and refraining from hugging Tim, trying to check his injuries first.

Robin moves slowly, but as efficiently as he can, fighting the aches that insist he stop trying to sit up. He grabs Dick's hand and squeezes, "I'm oka—" but the coughing undermines him.

Voice failing, he points.

Red Breast is on the ground, breathing unevenly with three bullet holes in his abdomen.

Tim can already tell that two of them are fatal.

With Dick's help, he limps towards his dying rescuer.

"Always," The synthesizer is shorting out, "Always hated that guy…"

And something about the voice makes time and the universe halt inside of Tim. Because he could have sworn that the same voice was in his ears only seconds ago.

"… Hated him. So much."

Dick places a hand on the fellow's stomach, trying to slow the flow of blood. Tim bites his tongue about the pointlessness of it as he fumbles and finds a catch in the man's suit. Capeless Batman is muttering something about a guy named Terry, and how this is probably going to haunt him forever, when Tim finally bypasses the suit's security.

The face of the black uniform peels back, and Tim holds his breath as the same flat, dark-blue eyes that greet him every morning in the mirror blink up at him from purple hollows of sleeplessness.

This one is younger than his evil Bat-self. But not by much. The angles of his face are sharper, his cheeks more hollowed out. The shadows under his eyes are just as dark, but he's messier, with a five-o-clock shadow bordering on six-o-clock stretched along his jaw, interrupted by an angry yet long-healed scar at his throat.

He hears Dick choke on air behind him, and when he turns to see the look on Dick's face, it occurs to Robin that maybe this Timothy Drake looks even more like the one Dick left behind in his own world.

Dick's hands over the bleeding bullet holes are still pointless, but Tim places his own palms over them anyway.

Those mirror eyes seem to regain some coherency.

"M'sorry about your Bruce. Should've… ngh… intervened sooner."

"You were trying to save your own world." Tim offers.

"Yeah well," He hisses through the pain, and Tim can feel Dick's hands beneath his own clutch tighter, "It's…ngh… not really mine. And there was never much left to save…"

Tim is left to puzzle that as Red Breast's gaze shifts up and behind him.

"Dick. Stop eyeing the med kit in your utility belt. Can't… can't fix me."

Tim doesn't want to look behind him again. He can hear the pained inhuman noise coming from Dick's throat just fine.

His older double continues, "Dick. Let me… let me enjoy this, kay? Haven't seen your face in… such a long time. S'good birthday present."

It's not important. It's really, not, but it's out of Tim's mouth before he even—"How old are you?"

He squints thoughtfully before closing his eyes, as if he's just resting them and not, well, dying. "Twenty-eight. Wow."

"Wow." Kinda surprising any Robin makes it that far. Considering.

Red's eyes crack open just enough to meet Tim's eyes and he knows they're both sharing the same thought.

"Hey," His voice is growing weaker, and it draws Tim in closer, until Robin can feel the whispered breath along his ear. "You… you will never be _that._ Not after this. I promise…"

Now Tim is the one making inhuman noises, but he can't help it.

"But you've got to try not to become me either, okay?"

This Tim has not seen Dick's face in a very long time. This Tim is also losing his entire world, but doesn't believe he's losing much at all. Robin looks at the shadows beneath his eyes once again, and recognizes the loneliness of them before nodding so he won't have to look anymore.

"Okay."

They sit and wait until the ragged breaths stop.

Dick says something about a burial, but Tim shakes his head, and takes Dick's hand, pulling him back outside. Towards the street, but away from the burned black-caped body.

That damn discarnate light reappears. Rambles some sickening platitude about victory and the last Batman standing.

Dick shakes off his stupor in time to pull Tim close, gripping like a vice as the light draws closer.

He makes sure it swallows them both.

 _e.n.d._

* * *

Fun fact: Tim Drake's first appearance is listed as occurring in 1989, which-as of 2017-makes him 28 years old in terms of publication history. :)


End file.
